C Is for Cryptocurrency: Here’s How to Make Blockchain Child’s Play
Can you explain digital currency to a five-year-old? A piggy bank turned hardware wallet and picture books are helping to introduce children to the money of the future.

Can you explain blockchain to a five-year-old? It can be hard to do in this techno-jargon-heavy sector. However, that’s not stopping a handful of entrepreneurs focused on teaching younger children about “money and the future of finance through play,” as Filipo Yacob, founder and CEO of Pigzbe, puts it.

Yacob knows the territory. He is the inventor of Cubetto, an educational toy that teaches children as young as three the basics of coding. It has been sold in more than 100 countries. Now he’s focused on Pigzbe, a combination game and hardware wallet he calls “a 21st century digital piggy bank that runs on our own cryptocurrency, wollo.”

For young children, Pigzbe’s hardware wallet acts as a controller for a game in which they earn wollo for learning about finance. And parents can use that wallet as a portal for paying that all-important allowance, or even gifts, in cryptocurrency.

“One of our main aims is to help children become financially literate,” Yacob tells ThirtyK. “Traditional piggy banks only teach about saving and spending…. By tokenizing the piggy bank, we can now teach about exchanging and physical modeling as well.”